Located on Martin Luther King Jr Ave, the Five Points Youth and Garden Center aspires to leverage a partnership of dynamic community-serving organizations to support under-resourced neighborhoods in East Knoxville. A series of mid-century Urban Renewal projects physically disconnected East Knoxville from the city center, and since that time the community has experienced social challenges ranging from a lack of connectivity, disinvestment, loss of generational wealth, blight, food scarcity, and violence among youth. As a facility, the Youth and Garden Center engages these challenges by supporting young people, promoting small local businesses, and expanding education around locally grown food.
The Center engages contemporary urban challenges in East Knoxville with a partnership of organizations serving youth, entrepreneurs, and urban gardens. This new community hub will provide after-school and summertime programming for young people in East Knoxville, as well as nightly family-style meals for kids. The facility is strategically anchored between Vine Middle Magnet and Austin East Magnet High, and with visions for multi-modal connectivity along the MLK Jr Ave corridor, the facility location effectively creates a new Educational Spine as it connects these two important neighborhood schools.
The Center also supports entrepreneurs with a business incubator space focused on promoting minority-owned startups. The coworking space, equipped with offices, conference rooms, work-enabled outdoor spaces, and shared amenities, alongside networking and professional development programming, all work together to grow the emerging business community and facilitate wealth generation for the neighborhood.
Finally, to address food insecurity in East Knoxville, the community center will host an urban agriculture component with demonstration gardens, a greenhouse, and a teaching kitchen. Pedestrian friendly initiatives in the area connect the Youth and Garden Center to nearby food-production gardens, while the new facility provides space for educational gatherings focused on growing and cooking fresh produce. The facility also features food storage, so that it may become a distribution point for the produce grown in the area.
